1850—all over again

02Oct07

Clayton Earl Duncan is on a mission. He wants Lake County’s Kelseyville to change its name. Why? Because Andrew Kelsey, the man this little town at the base of Mount Konacti honors is best known for his cruelty to the native population.

Clayton Earl Duncan’s federally recognized tribe is the Rancheria Band of Pomo Indians. But Duncan belongs to four other tribes, including Maidu and Yuki, though “I refer to myself as a Do-na-pa-ti Hinto, which means a Northern Mountain person—a human being.” Some 200 of his Pomo people were slaughtered in May of 1850 on a little island off Clear Lake they called Ba-don-na-pa-ti. History books call this The Bloody Island Massacre.

Captain Nathaniel Lyon’s U.S. Army detachments’ intended retribution against those Indians who murdered American pioneers Andrew Kelsey and Charles Stone was actually perpetrated against tribelets who had no hand in this previous crime. Women and children were shot, bayonetted and dumped in surrounding tule rushes and heaped on a pyre to burn because, well…, they were Indian.

Andrew Kelsey and business partner Charles Stone were the first white men to settle in what would become Lake County. The two acquired Salvador Vallejo’s cattle operation in the fall of 1847, a little more than a year after Sonoma’s Bear Flag Rebellion resulted in perhaps the shortest-lived Republic, ever. Just three weeks after declaring independence the Bear Flag Republic became part of the United States.

But the writing was already on the wall regarding Kelsey. According to Alan Rosenus in his book, General Vallejo And The Advent Of The Americans, “Two of the Kelsey brothers, Andrew and Benjamin, had come to California in 1841 with (John) Bidwell’s group… If there were Indians around and laws to be obeyed, the Kelseys were bound to wind up at odds with the authorities.”

At the time of European contact as many as 3.000 Pomo, Miwok and Wappo peoples lived in the vicinity of Lake County’s Clear Lake. These tribelets inhabited tiny villages scattered throughout the region. I don’t know how many lived near the present town of Kelseyville, but some 80 Native Americans live in Kelseyville today. While about 8,000 Pomos inhabited Northern California just prior to first European contact, by 1880 their population had dwindled to less than 1,500.

Certainly California’s Indians had been grossly mistreated by Spanish, Russians and Mexican alike, but Kelsey and Stone set the bar at miserably new lows. The oft drunken pair enslaved the indigenous population, beat at least four Indians to death, shot others, hung many from trees by their hands, intentionally starved families and repeatedly raped Indian women and children.

When gold was discovered in 1849 Kelsey forced 50 Pomo men into the gold fields as laborers. Once there, Kelsey sold provisions intended to sustain his workers to other miners. Kelsey proceeded to starve and literally work these men to death. Of the 50 Pomos forced into service, only two returned home alive.

Of course Kelsey wasn’t alone abusing the native population. On April 22, 1850 the State of California passed “An Act for the Government and Protection of Indians” virtually legalizing slavery for “vagrant” Indians who didn’t happen to be employed, but regarding their mistreatment, “in no case shall a white man be convicted of any offense upon the testimony of an Indian.”

An editorial in the Yreka Herald went straight to the heart of the matter. “Now that general hostilities against the Indians have commenced we hope that the government will render such aid as will enable the citizens of the north to carry on a war of extermination until the last redskin of these tribes has been killed. Extermination is no longer a question of time—the time has arrived, the work commenced, and let the first man that says treaty or peace be regarded as a traitor.”

Now ponder this headline from the the Humboldt Times: “Good Haul of Diggers… 38 Bucks Killed, 40 Squaws and Children.”

Eighteen treaties were negotiated and signed between the United States and California’s indigenous peoples. They deeded 8.5 million acres of land to various tribes. But these treaties weren’t to the liking of California’s mining and agricultural interests. The entire lot of them were conveniently misplaced and never brought before Congress for ratification.

With such compassionate souls shaping our newly formed state is it any wonder those affected by these laws, judgments and attitudes rebelled? Andrew Kelsey, namesake of Kelseyville paid for it with his life.

When stuff like this is dredged up and placed before us we often respond with, “Well, sure…, but that was way back then. We don’t do those sorts of things today!”

Oh yeah?

I accompanied a group Sonoma State University students to the sight of the Bloody Island Massacre recently. I had the pleasure to talk with Heidi LaMoreaux, assistant professor of interdisciplinary studies as we drove to and from Lake County. I also had the opportunity to interview Clayton Earl Duncan at the sight of The Bloody Island Massacre. Duncan says he’s tried to convince locals to change the name of Kelseyville before. According to Duncan one supervisor told him, “Clayton, why do you want to open up an old can of worms and cause trouble?”

Now, there are those who’d likely dismiss Duncan’s remarks as sour grapes. To illustrate his point Duncan suggested I read a recent letters-to-the-editor page from one of Lake County’s local newspapers. So I did. Four different missives supported a previously published article encouraging school districts to take a hard line in retaining Indian caricatures as their mascots—and to hell with local tribal member objections.

But one of the letters really brings history into the now:

“They should have been glad to see a superior culture come to their rescue’, it reads, ‘They have no respect for what they have received free. Their reservations are examples of what pure Communism does to people and is ironically supported by a free enterprise economy they hate… The reservations are fading because young Indians see more opportunity beyond their fences and rebel against the enforcement of ‘the old ways.’ Who wants to eat rodents tossed onto the coals of a dying fire by a fading culture in a smoke-polluted teepee when a warm pizza parlor with cold beer is a mile away and has a sign in the window, ‘help-wanted’?… The old Indians are poisoned by their own ideas. In three generations they will be gone. What is the sense of preserving a culture of helpless hardship and hate?”

I swear, it sounds like 1850—all over again.

Filed under: Bear Flag Revolt, Lake County, Native Americans, Pomo, San Francisco Bay Area History, drunks, slavery   |  4 Comments